We Are the Night

Despite their innovative 90s repertoire, the Chemical Brothers have spent much of this decade keeping pace. Now, sporting guest spots from Klaxons, Midlake, Fatlip, and Willy Mason, they return with their sixth album.

It's going to take another few years, a lot of nostalgia, and even more critical evangelism for the Chemical Brothers to be recognized as one of the most all-around consistent acts of the 1990s. More than a decade after the release of their debut album, 1995's Exit Planet Dust, they remain inextricably tied to Big Beat electronica, a genre that had already fallen out of fashion by the time the tech bubble burst. Since most of America's hopes for so-called "electronica" were pinned on a cynically marketed next-big-thingism, its chart failure has tended to overshadow everything else-- including a fair critical appraisal, as Salon's Michelle Goldberg demonstrated in a pan of the Chemical Brothers' 2002 album Come With Us: "Commercially, the mid-to-late-90s conceit that electronic music would wrest the airwaves from guitar rock dinosaurs has proved as fanciful as the idea that online video rental could be a billion-dollar business."

You don't need to have the Chemicals' Singles 93-03 video compilation in your Netflix queue to question the relevance of that statement: Electronica was a failure as a mass-culture lifestyle trend. But it was successful, too, in one important area: producing memorable pop records. Even in the post-crash doldrums of the early 2000s, the Chemical Brothers sustained their creative stride more effectively than most other artists clogging up the modern rock charts 30 notches above them. Albums like Come With Us and 2005's Push the Button were more pacekeepers than trendsetters, sure, but there was a cohesive freedom to them, a sort of universal dance music catchall vibe that cross-evolved through acid house, electro, hip-hop, and whatever else they could layer big, explosive bass over. Even as their returns began to diminish the further they got from the staggering peak of Dig Your Own Hole, the mild creative downturn wasn't significant enough to damage the overall feeling of optimistic, psychedelic egalitarianism embedded in their music.

This, though, this We Are the Night-- no, come on, not now. Not after Fatboy Slim's Palookaville and the Prodigy's Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned and Orbital's The Blue Album and Daft Punk's Human After All and the last two Moby records. Just because Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons are falling off the cliff a few years later than most of the other once-great hopes of 90s dance music doesn't make the plummet any less frustrating or embarrassing. Not even the low points on Push the Button suggested they were about to tank this hard.

On We Are the Night, the Chemical Brothers have switched from integrators to imitators: Where 1999's Surrender opened with "Music: Response", expertly streamlining the cutting-edge electro-funk of early Timbaland, "Do It Again" sounds like a public domain version of a FutureSex/LoveSounds beat, with perky synths and an aloof radio-dance churn gutlessly approximating the elements that make those tracks work. Guest singer Ali Love turns in a mediocre Timberlake impression-- although even JT himself couldn't pull off a dippy couplet like "got a brain like bubblegum/ Blowing up my cranium."

The album's title track attempts to weave the duo's euphoric buildups and breakdowns into warmed-over Krautrock, but with a beat that never crests, its dynamics are left to a weakly kitschy Perrey-Kingsley melody, damning the track to 6 1/2 minutes of a rickety retro-future parody of the 360-degree treadmill from 2001. "Das Speigel" is an ill-advised stab at minimal house-- have the Chems ever even attempted to pull off minimal anything? -- and after layering on enough electronic giggles, squeals, melodicas, guitars, and extraneous sound effects to a briefly-promising groove, it turns out sounding like something from side 6 of Booka Shade's Sandinista!.

Other autopsies of this album might pin its weaker moments on the guest spots, but those mostly just make an already-bad situation moderately worse. "All Rights Reversed" would still sound like groggy emo if they got somebody besides the Klaxons to mutter close-harmony vocals over its inflated theatricality. It's probably for the best that "Battle Scars" wasn't given to a better singer than Willy Mason: His head-trauma Gordon Lightfoot vocals and the sub-Rod McKuen lyrics ("There's a line in the sand/ Put there by man/ By man whose children built up castles made of stone") are perfectly suited to the track's tedious, xylophone-laden indie sleepwalk. And while there's been a well-earned avalanche of derision aimed at Fatlip's dopey nature-doc rap "The Salmon Dance", he had to work with the beat the Chemicals gave him; most MCs, faced with the prospect of rhyming over something Arthur Baker might have concocted after an afternoon of gorging on vanilla-frosted hash brownies and Spongebob reruns, would probably rap about dancing like a fish on crack, too.

The Chemical Brothers' descent into ineptitude is at least accompanied by a few brief highlights: "Saturate" plays like one of Surrender's acid house throwbacks, complete with Bill Ward-size drums, while "A Modern Midnight Conversation"-- based on a whipcrack cowbell beat and the bassline from Crystal Grass' 1974 psych-disco classic "Crystal World"-- is as euphoric as anything they've done this decade short of "Star Guitar." But those flashes of effortless dancefloor-filling greatness used to be the norm for the Chemical Brothers; as exceptions on an album of colossal blunders, they can only serve as fleeting reminders. I once found it hard to fathom that Dig Your Own Hole was released ten years ago; it's easier to believe now.